Christian Rock Lifers #2: Steve Taylor

Nowadays, Steve Taylor is a pillar of the Nashville Christian music
community, but there was a time when he was its Marilyn Manson, Dr. Demento,
and Eminem rolled up in one. Taylor first started blowing toupees back with
his I Want to Be a Clone EP in 1982, the title track of which
lampooned unthinking, "assembly line" Christianity. But the then
twenty-five-year-old Taylor was just as harsh on the secular world: in
"Whatever Happened to Sin?" he blasts a country where "the closets are empty,
and the clinics are full."

In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, Mark
Allan Powell reckons that Taylor, who soon took on racism in the church, as
well as moral relativism and euthanasia, managed to maintain a prominent
place in the industry because he basically attacked the church from its right
flank with "critiques ... that do not question the basic assumptions that
underlie some of the foibles of American Christianity." Regardless, Taylor
didn't choose an easy road for himself in the only genre where, as Powell
also notes, controversy "tends to hurt sales." His antics made him
a hot potato for record companies, even though he sold lots of records for
the time and was one of the genre's first real superstars.

Taylor took a break from the Christian music industry in 1991, when he
moved to London and formed a group called Chagall Guevara, which signed to
MCA in the general market. No experiment is a failure, but Chagall's
self-titled debut certainly bombed, saleswise, despite good reviews from
secular publications. Taylor returned uncowed to Christian music with the
excellent Squint in '93. Inspired by albums like the Clash's
London Calling, Taylor's insistence on first-class recording and
playing, as well as his sharp wit, set a new standard for the often middling
Christian market.

He also introduced Christians to the art of the remix, from the three
versions of the title track of his first full LP, Meltdown at Madame
Tussaud's, to an album of nothing but remixes in 1985. With his
recording career ceasing to holds his attention, Taylor began to produce
other artists, notably Newsboys, and direct music videos.

In 1992, Taylor founded his own record company, Squint Entertainment,
where he signed Chevelle, L.A. Symphony, and Burlap to Cashmere. Squint
really made its bones, however, with its first signing, Sixpence None the
Richer, whose single "Kiss Me" went to No. 1 in ten countries, in no small
part due to Taylor's ferocious championing of the band (pestering the
single's way onto the She's All That soundtrack, for
instance).

In one of those moves that must make sense to record executives, the
successful label was wrested from Taylor's control by its corporate parent,
Word, in 2001, and then shuttered, its bands distributed to other Word-owned
labels or dropped, its unreleased records mostly shelved. Since then,
Taylor's mostly devoted himself to film and production and completed his
first major motion picture, The Second Chance, which was
released through Sony Pictures Classics in February 2006. It stars Michael
W. Smith as a pastor in a comfortable, predominantly white, Nashville
evangelical church, who's forced to confront racial inequity within and
without the church.

I spoke to Taylor as he was waiting to get his cars inspected.

It seems like your film is addressing something of an elephant
in the room when it comes to American evangelical Christianity:
race.

STEVE TAYLOR: Yeah. It's certainly an insider's peek. And, you know,
I've actually found that most Christians I know don't mind being criticized.
They go to church every Sunday to hear a sermon, usually directed at them!
They don't especially like it coming from the outside.

That was sort of how you made your mark on Christian music in
the beginning.

In some regards, that's kind of my MO.

Do you think that appreciation of criticism is
genuine?

As far as fellow Christians? Yeah, because the Bible is full of stories
of people who God used in spite of their faults. And, as Christians, you
know, we believe that we are sinners saved by grace and Christ's atoning
work, so it's always an odd thing when you see a Christian maybe who works
within the public eye who comes off as arrogant. And it's particularly
troubling when maybe you see a talk show host or something like that who,
uh...

Calls for the assassination of a world leader?
[Televangelist Pat Robertson had urged the U.S. to "take out" Venezuelan
prime minister Hugo Chavez a few days before we spoke.]

Yeah! Well, exactly. Because it's so completely at odds with the Gospel
message, and I guess, to his credit, [Robertson] apologized, whereas some
people wouldn't bother to apologize. You know, you could sort of excuse it
from people with other points of view, but Christians, we really don't have
any excuse for that kind of behavior.

Are you very politically minded?

I've always had a very strong pro-life viewpoint, but as far as politics
in general go, I've kind of stayed more apolitical--just because political
affiliations invariably involve a lot of compromises and a lot of alliances,
and, usually, you throw your hat in the ring and stay with somebody, and they
disappoint you. I certainly wouldn't consider myself a very politically
engaged person outside of those areas where the Bible speaks really
specifically and strongly to me. And those would be pro-life areas and also
peace and justice and helping the poor. So, my political views don't usually
end up sitting very well in either party.

Do you know the band Pedro the Lion?

I don't know David, but I'm real familiar with them.

He told me that one of your songs really affected him when he
was a kid, "Sin for a Season." He didn't even want to play it for his
parents because he was worried it might be too ambiguous.

Oh, right!

He grew up in a really strict home. You were a real
turning-point artist for him, apparently.

Huh. That's a high compliment because I really like his lyrics.

Were you allowed to listen to secular music growing
up?

No. In fact, I didn't have a radio till I was fifteen or sixteen.

Holy mackerel. You were a music major,
right?

Yeah, in college. That's not to say we weren't musical. I would listen
to Top 40. The DJ at the Top 40 station was realy kind of arch and
opinionated. He would play certain songs and say, 'Frankly, I hate this
song, but...' Even though I didn't know that much, I still became a really
opinionated guy! As I've told people, I didn't get fully musically engaged
until [the Clash's] London Calling. A real turning point for
me.

You said in a documentary I saw [Why Should the Devil
Have All the Good Music?] that London Calling really changed
your life.

I was still musically minded, but that was the thing that made me wanna
get serious.

So you got saved, so to speak. And when you started making
music, you were almost immediately controversial.

It would be a little disingenuous of me to say I don't know why. The
songs weren't done with the intent to offend, but I had a feeling they would
be controversial, just because there was no satire to speak of in Christian
music at the time.

Was it commercial suicide?

There was a song on a later record called "I Blew Up the Clinic Real
Good." It was probably satirical. [It was about an ice cream man who
destroys an abortion clinic to ensure future customers.] I'm not even
totally sure it was such a good idea in retrospect, but I remember I was on a
tour in Australia, and some kind of Geraldo-type guy in Australia picked up
on and started doing these attacks on the songs. This guy would come into
town, like, "This needs to be stopped!" and I ended up being on Australia's
version of the Today Show saying it was a satirical song.

Conventional wisdom would way, "What a godsend for a tour!" And every
date ended up being canceled except for the Sydney date! It was a disaster!
So, yeah, that's where I realized that old say "any publicity is good
publicity" doesn't work in Christian music.

What about that early stuff--do you like it
now?

Well, I don't like any of my work, particularly, because the more I've got
into producing, the harder it is to pull yourself out and listen to these
things with any kind of objectivity. I'm like, 'That's a stupid sound. What
was I thinking?' And plus, you know, like, maybe every other song lyrically
feels like, that feels pretty good, but a lot of them, they were just so much
specific to their time, and now they seem either dated or melodramatic, or
there's a verse that I wish I wouldn't have put in, so I really just have
nothing but regrets!

Your production career seemed to mark the rehabilitation of
Steve Taylor.

Well, the producing has been a strange trajectory, because I followed up.
I dabbled in it a little bit, particularly with my own stuff, coproduced
things, and had done one really obscure record in England right before we
started Chagall Guevara.

It was right when the band--we hadn't broken up yet, but we were trying to
get out of our MCA deal, which led me to producing a Newsboys album. And,
you know, originally just helping them out on some lyrics turned into a
full-blown production, and it was very much a pop production. And what they
needed lyrically was, generally speaking, not something that I would have
done with my own records. But, on the other hand, it was great fun and a
great experience as more of a craftsman I suppose--

I imagine in some way it's like taking you out of the
equation.

In some way it was. Because there would be songs, most of these songs
were songs I would never have done for my own records. But, on the other
hand, I really loved doing it. One of the difficulties of being an artist is
that, no matter how hard you try, you still get boxed in by your part work.
And if you totally ignore that, you do so at your own peril. I remember a
string of records Neil Young did in the '80s where there was a rockabilly
record, one was an electronic record--what are you this month? But, at the
same time, [he was] learning how to make records and learning how to use the
studio to full effect, learning to become a better musician in the
process.

You've had an impact on secular music, too, particularly
modern rock.

I would call it, maybe, a moderate impact, but hey, I'll go along with
you!

Stick with me kid!

When I was doing the Squint label, when I felt like a band had real
talent, I was just really passionate about bands that I thought were great.
And, certainly, Sixpence was a band like that. And Chevelle was a band like
that.

The hip-hop collective L.A. Symphony--that record never got released. We
had Will from Black-Eyed Peas do four of the tracks, before, you know, Black
Eyed Peas got ruined by that chick singer! And Prince Paul produced a track,
but beyond all that, they were fantastic rappers; they were just, like,
writing some of the best lyrics I was hearing anywhere. So, I don't miss the
record business at all. And I don't really miss running a record label. But
I miss that sense of, you know, when you find a really great talent, you
wanna do whatever you can to get the world to hear it.

But that's almost an unproductive attitude in the music
industry.

Yeah, it's not a commonly held belief. Part of the reason of having a
record label where I controlled its destiny was because the frustration of
making a good record, and the Squint record is the one record I
made that I can still listen to, and having, in that case, what appears to be
a relationship with Warner Bros., and the possibility of getting it heard
further, and just coming up against brick walls that had nothing more than
people deciding, 'Well, that's not my department.' And it's really
frustrating.

Did you ever feel that being a Christian ever kept you from
more mainstream acceptance?

Probably nobody would have articulated that as such, but yeah, I think
that's true. A lot of Christian artists use that as an excuse for not making
good music, but you still are dealing with a certain amount of prejudice,
mostly along the lines of the kind of old school believe that rock 'n' roll
is primarily about rebellion, and how can a Christian be rebellious?

But I do think--and part of it's because, frankly, I could have held out
for a few more years and waited to get signed to a mainstream label, but the
early response came from a Christian label, and at that point, in the '80s,
nobody knew how separate the two worlds would become in the next few years.
And now, of course, we live in an age where they're less separate,
actually.

Things do seem to be converging. Obviously, one of the bigger
innovations has been better quality.

Right. I think also--you know, when I was touring, we were playing in
theaters. I kind of had a rule not to play in churches, but even if I wanted
to play in churches, there weren't that many churches that would have had us.
And that's really changed, and now there's almost, like, a circuit of
churches and church gymnasiums and things like that were these bands played.
And so, a lot of them are frankly better than their mainstream counterparts.
They can play better; they've had more road experience. In the '80s, the
flavor of the year one year was signing Australian bands, and it was because
all these bands were growing up playing in pubs in Australia, and they were
better bands. Part of the problem in America is, if you're a young band, you
can't really playin in clubs because they won't let you in if you're under
eighteen. So, this circuit for Christian rock bands developed [and] allowed
bands to actually get good.

It almost reminds me of the punk underground when I was a kid.
Do you stay in touch with that scene?

I don't at all. My answer would so completely be based on ignorance. I
know there's a lot of good bands around, I'm just not listening to it. I've
gotten to where I actually enjoy music again, which--

Oh, man, I am so jealous of you.

Well, that's it! When you work in it, it's almost impossible to enjoy it
because you're kind of evaluating everything as you listen to it. But, like,
my favorite album of the last year is the Arcade Fire. And there's a great
indie record store in town where I'll just go and say, "Tell me what's good."
They'll load me up.

Do you ever get besieged by crazed Christian rock fans?

I still get a lot of CDs and demos. I just went through another stack the
other day because I felt bad about not listening to them. But I don't have a
way for people to e-mail me.

It was hard to find you!

I know, I know. There's a guy in Memphis who does a fan website, and I
think once in a while he'll forward me something.

What would it take for you to start doing music again?

It probably would take a long stretch of open time, and a complete failure
of this movie, frankly.

Is movie-making where it's at for you now?

That was always kind of the idea. Even when I was in college, I studied
music as a major and film as an undeclared minor. And I was doing some short
films in college and right out of college. I figured I'd get into film
sooner or later. As I got going, I kind of felt like music was kind of a
younger person's game, and that film, I might actually benefit from
accumulating a certain amount of years and wisdom before I jumped too
seriously into that. So, you know, I still dabble in music videos and things
like that. But that was kind of my long-range plan, to get into
filmmaking.

So, what's your next film?

Well, the next project, I'm hoping it's just a straight comedy. I gotta
start raising money for it. The script's almost done. I think it's funny.
It seems funny to me and the guys writing it. When we were doing The
Second Chance, the editor's one of the cowriters, and I kept telling
him, 'You know, if this is a comedy, I'd know exactly what to do with this.'
So, that's, hopefully that'll be the next movie. And then, after that, I'd
love to do something--outside of being as hopefully funny as it is, no
spiritual themes of anything like that. But then, I'd like to do another
movie after that that would a more logical follow-up to The Second
Chance.

You don't want to be known as a Christian filmmaker,
too.

No, you know, it's weird. 'Cause if I had a chance, what would I do
differently? And my original plan was to do the comedy first. But I planned
another movie prior to that, and I just couldn't get the script right. In
the meantime, you know, you're supposed to write about what you know, and I
started writing this script with some other friends that became The
Second Chance, and you kind of go with whatever project seems to have
the juice behind it, and that was how this one was.

So, in a perfect world, I might have started with the comedy first. But I
think, in retrospect, the movie I just finished, I can make mistakes, and it
wouldn't be fatal. And with comedy, there's just very little room for error.
If people don't laugh, you're in big, big trouble.